Company: Elephant Village
Project: Improve Elephant Welfare
Goal: To improve quality of life for camp elephants
Summary: In general, the goal of elephant camps in Southeast Asia is to offer tourists elephant rides on seats that are strapped onto the backs of elephants. Elephant Village was no different when I joined the company in 2013.
Tourism was picking up in Laos and the town of Luang Prabang was a particular hotspot. As a result, a thousand visitors made their way out to Elephant Village per day to participate in elephant riding. It goes without saying it took a physical toll on the elephants. Right away, I knew we needed to do something drastic to lessen the physical and emotional stress being put on the elephants. We needed to come up with some ground rules to prevent the elephants from being overworked. The one concern visitors frequently brought up was whether it was acceptable to use howdahs (seats) on the back of elephants for riding. To address this, we opted to test bare-neck rides in order to see whether it were even feasible because of obvious safety concerns with such a free way of riding. The last thing we wanted is for people to fall off elephants and injure themselves.
The solution we came up with was to allow only one person to ride with a mahout (elephant trainer) sitting right behind to keep the them safe. Initially, the owner of the camp did not approve of the idea as Elephant Village would not be able to accommodate the same number of guests. In the end, it was about making money, not necessarily solely for profit but also to be able to care for the elephants because Elephant Village is not a non-profit organization and it relied heavily on tourism to keep its operation going. To address this issue we made the rides shorter. Each guest would only ride for 15 minutes as opposed to the usual 45 minutes to an hour as before. This worked out in the end because it alleviated so much stress for the elephants. They were no longer required to carry two guests on a howdah for 45 minutes at a time. The riding became one guest on the bare-neck for 15 minutes at a time. Furthermore, we made sure the rides finished by lunchtime to avoid overexerting the elephants as the afternoon sun can be overbearing.
Result: With this new direction, I had to design all new promotional material, including pamphlets, signage, the information and photos on the website to reflect the changes we made. This was not something that could have been done overnight because it meant changing the signature part of the experience prior. It was a lot of work for sure, but in the end it was well worth all the effort because visitors really gravitated toward the new Elephant Village experiences. I came up with the “One-on-One Elephant Experience” ad campaign to highlight the very personal experience visitors can have with an elephant. Following this switch, Elephant Village became widely accepted as the most elephant-friendly camp in Luang Prabang and western tourists made it the number one outdoor attraction for several years running.
